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Post-PRIDE five years later: What happened to the main players?
By Zach Arnold | March 26, 2012
On March 27th, it will be the 5th anniversary of the transactional change between Dream Stage Entertainment & Zuffa over the assets of PRIDE. The elaborate press conference in Roppongi Hills, Tokyo was heralded as a chance to finally see ‘the Super Bowl of MMA’ between UFC & PRIDE. Of course, that never happened. When the sale went down, PRIDE marketed a Lightweight tournament featuring UFC & PRIDE names for a May ’07 event at Saitama Super Arena. That never happened.
What did happen was a rather pathetic ending for PRIDE. Their final show was in April of ’07 at Saitama Super Arena and Nobuyuki Sakakibara, the front man for PRIDE, used the occasion and the show as his final goodbye. In addition to having graphics all over the arena with his face on them, he had the fighters on the card come out and talk about what a great man he was and how sad they were to see PRIDE die. It was a pathetic, but fitting spectacle for a man of such character.
Soon after the sale took place, Zuffa hired Spectrum Gaming to run the background check on DSE for ‘due diligence.’ Yes, they did ‘due diligence’ after the transaction instead of before it. I wonder why. This resulted in a legal battle between the two parties over the asset sale agreement. The initial report was that $70M USD was paid but most insiders believe the final total was in the $10-13M USD range.
After PRIDE died, K-1 had the whole Japanese market to themselves. Kato & Shinoda, the right hand men & production power w/ Sakakibara in PRIDE, created DREAM. Of course, as a play on words, the parent company of DREAM is Real Entertainment. Sakakibara & his henchman Noboru Yamaguchi, famously of Kami no Puroresu magazine, continued on with Hustle pro-wrestling. When UFC relocated point man Jamie Pollack to Japan to take over the PRIDE operations, it was the Hustle crew that directed Japanese media to take photographs at said offices while running goofy pro-wrestling angles involving men like Kintaro Kanemura. UFC was completely oblivious to this happening despite the fact that all the major sports newspapers were running items on the angles.
Within a few months of Mr. Pollack’s arrival in Japan, the disgruntled DSE employees made their allegiance clear and ended up with DREAM. What a shocker. UFC was left with no choice but to lay off everyone and post a notice at the office to have the desks cleaned out immediately. This gave the media a chance to portray UFC as the cold-hearted foreign raiders that came to destroy PRIDE, made false promises about keeping things afloat, but then bailed out when no one was looking.
Of course, we saw how well this narrative played out when UFC ran at Saitama Super Arena last month. They won the battle but the media continues the image war against them by selectively not covering UFC despite the Japanese fight fans being desperate for some sort of product to support.
K-1, with DREAM as a tag partner, tried to fill the vacuum due to PRIDE’s death. K-1’s grand plan was to control the TV pipeline. If you wanted to be on TV, you had to play business by K-1’s rules. K-1 split the TV rights fees with you in exchange for you handling 100% of the risk for promoting the live house – the insurance, the salaries, the gate, the building & production rentals. DREAM initially did OK but eventually tanked on Tokyo Broadcasting System.
K-1, meanwhile, suffered declining numbers as well. Their relationship with Fuji TV was not as solid as it used to be and Tokyo Broadcasting System was their main partner. Some fighters were complaining about not getting paid. Alistair Overeem won the World GP 2010 tournament at Ariake Colosseum. He had signed up with talent agency Yoshimoto to make a big run in Japan. Within two months of that proclaimation, his ties with Japan were done. He made a shift to Strikeforce after he revealed that he, too, got stiffed on money.
Overeem’s last Japan fight was against Todd “TRT” Duffee and he vanquished him in 19 seconds on New Year’s Eve. The NYE event all but put K-1 out of financial commission. It was their last gasp.
A year later, DREAM would put on a New Year’s Eve event with Antonio Inoki as the front man. Satoshi Ishii was the sacrificial lamb to Fedor. The end result? Despite Fedor’s career cratering in the States with big losses, he went back to Japan and immediately became the #1 name again in MMA circles. Recently, he taped a game show series featuring names like Bob Sapp, Vader, Wakakirin, and “Hollywood” Tadao Yasuda. Fedor, of course, got put over. Despite all the peaks & valleys in his post-PRIDE MMA career, Fedor is still the King of Japanese MMA on a national scale in that country.
So, what has happened to all the major players that were involved in the fight scene since the collapse of PRIDE? Let’s take a look at some of the key players and where they stand now.
Nobuyuki Sakakibara would soon leave after PRIDE’s death and Hustle’s demise to go from Tokyo to… Okinawa. This is the equivalent of a New York City power broker going to Mobile, Alabama. I have nothing against the fine folks in Okinawa or Alabama, but when you’re a big city player you don’t naturally make a move to such a vastly different location. Any how, Sakakibara got himself a soccer team and has tried to make it into the bigger leagues of Japanese soccer. Last year, Tadashi Tanaka reported that there was discussion of Sakakibara resurfacing in Tokyo and getting the band back together again with Kato & company. Since New Year’s Eve, DREAM has gone dormant. Real Entertainment is now a de facto booking agency for Kato’s guys (Aoki in Bellator, Kawajiri in One FC). Despite month-long claims that DREAM would announce future show plans, there has been silence.
Kazuyoshi Ishii, who saw everything fall apart and his grand TV pipeline plan fail miserably with K-1 in the post-PRIDE era, is desperately trying to make things work with K-1 but under different circumstances. Ishii, who has aged considerably in the last few years since his prison stint for corporate tax evasion, recently worked as a referee for K-1 Koshien (high schooler) fights at Korakuen Hall in Tokyo. This was an unfathomable image to ever consider given how Ishii had made his bones by being connected with Soka Gakkai and with other entertainment power brokers. He’s reduced now to being a referee for young kids fighting. Ishii’s new tact with K-1 Koshien is that prize money will be award in the name of scholarships to top young fighters and that the event will be a platform to promote positive social values. A street-fighter, hard-living charmer is now suddenly professing to be straight & narrow.
Seiya Kawamata, the admitted K-1 yakuza fixer, is on the sidelines but keeps reportedly telling everyone that he’ll get back into the fight game. Kawamata was the central face for Shukan Gendai’s negative campaign against PRIDE. Kawamata reportedly wants back in as an event promoter and on a large scale. The problem for him is that he always has wanted the limelight and couldn’t accept being a behind-the-scenes shadow player. In today’s Japanese climate where the police are waging an all-out war (albeit with limited powers & tools at their disposal), Kawamata is in no position to get back on television ever again. He had his one shot with the Inoki Bom-Ba-Ye 2003 event on Nippon TV from Kobe Wing Stadium and blew it.
Ken Imai, the former right-hand man of Kazuyoshi Ishii — who turned on Ishii when the corporate tax evasion scandal hit and became Sakakibara’s right hand man in landing Mirko Cro Cop from agent Miro Mijatovic — is basically powerless now. He was supposed to be the ‘book smart’ guy to Ishii’s ‘street smart’ charm and it worked very well for many years in K-1. However, once PRIDE died and Mirko’s career didn’t pan out so well in the UFC, Imai lost his power source.
- Miro Mijatovic: The yakuza’s contract to kill him & PRIDE’s execution
- Miro Mijatovic: Fedor, Mirko, and PRIDE yakuza’s loaded pistols
- Miro Mijatovic on the yakuza ownership war of PRIDE in November 2003
- Beginner’s searchable guide on cast of characters involved in PRIDE scandal
Miro Mijatovic, the man who was the super-agent behind Fedor & Mirko Cro Cop before PRIDE went to war with him, is out of the fight game and is making money in various businesses including the hotel industry. Despite having a Tokyo civil court clear his name and validate his credibility as a honorable witness in relation to what happened with the PRIDE & Kawamata cases, Miro has been fighting to clear his name after he was destroyed in the Japanese press as a crazy foreigner. Five years later after the PRIDE transaction, he’s still fighting a lot of his old battles and those in the press who tried to destroy him were in shock when the Spike TV interview series came out. There has been a self-imposed wall of silence by many of the major sports writers in Japan who covered PRIDE during this time period, as they do not want to talk about the yakuza or steroid (testosterone) issues whatsoever. The mentality has never changed in the media.
Remember Chris Benoit going on a rampage and killing his family? You hardly ever saw the word ‘steroid’ used at all in the Japanese press when covering the story. Jushin Liger, who had booked Benoit to win the Super J Cup ’94 tournament, practically went into silence mode when the death occurred. It was almost as if Liger had never heard of the guy.
I bring this story up for example because the media mentality of what happened during the PRIDE implosion is the same mentality that has always existed and will never change. Last week, NOAH had to finally address their own yakuza scandal regarding a yakuza couple that was swindling senior citizens Bernie Madoff-style in order to finance their pro-wrestling joy ride. Only a handful of newspapers touched the story and even fewer MMA/pro-wrestling Japanese bloggers said a word about it.
When I talk about the climate of fear and a climate of dishonesty as far as the press goes in Japan, I am speaking from experience. I know what it’s like to be double-crossed. I know how the writers are going to behave before they even make a move. They are so predictable. Not one article has been written in Japanese about Rampage’s testosterone comments or the whole testosterone issue in MMA since this thing blew up. I’m not just talking about newspapers, either — I’m also talking about ‘new age’ Japanese bloggers & reporters who had a track record of translating what was said on this very site into Japanese on their sites now refusing to talk about the two kinds of scandals (yakuza & drugs) that can bring down the industry. They’re cowards who don’t have any sort of accountability.
So, let’s talk about the yakuza in 2012 as far as the fight game is concerned.
UFC drew well at Saitama Super Arena because they have a multi-year show agreement with Dentsu, one of the world’s largest ad agencies. They brought all the muscle to the table. UFC sure wishes Dentsu was active in every country they run in because their life would be a whole lot easier. UFC doesn’t have to get their hands dirty since they aren’t a local Japanese operation.
So, what about PRIDE & NOAH? The police in Japan have a line of demarcation between being a yakuza front company versus being a company that ends up cooperating or working with another company that’s connected to the yakuza. In the case of PRIDE, the police clearly saw PRIDE as a front company where the money was being cycled in and out to the owner who was labeled as “Mr. I” (Ishizaka aka Kim Dok-Soo). In the NOAH scandal, you had a yakuza couple that played the classic ‘sponsor’ role but this time where they got the money was outed and it was a sleazy senior citizen scam. In addition, the couple had scammed Misawa’s widow out of a loan — yet another classic yakuza scam.
Understand that when it comes to big arenas for fight promotions, the yakuza has always been their version of Ticketmaster. Yes, there’s Lawson and e-plus, but when it comes to moving blocks of thousands or tens of thousands of tickets, you deal with the gangs. First off, you have to deal with them anyways in paying protection money based on which location you’re running your show at. The police are trying to crack down on this heavily but only with moderate success. This factor is why you see so many promotions run the Kanto region only now for shows (Tokyo, Yokohama) instead of Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe, Hiroshima, Sapporo. Outside of Tokyo, you are dealing with protection rackets. Promoters are so ingrained to view paying protection money as a ‘mandated tax.’ So, after you pay the protection money, you’re dealing with gangs that might want to come to the show to either be seen on TV (celebrity/recruiting factor) or they want to show up for a good time and to gamble on fights. So, you run a place that has 16,000 seats, you may cut a deal with the gangs for a 50/50 split of receipts for 6,000 or more tickets. The gangs then take those tickets and they go to various outlets/stores and they cut deals through coercion with said stores for a cut of the action.
Then there’s the dummy company factor. Many production companies in Japan are ran by the gangs. It’s easy cash to make and to also launder money. Hey, here’s a million bucks for that sound stage, thanks for being my friend here and helping me on the show. Plenty of ‘fan service’ (merchandising) outlets are also yakuza-owned or operated. By using dummy companies, you can easily skim & launder cash in and out quickly.
I bring up all these factors because they have as much meaning in Japan in 2012 for running a fight business as they did in 2007 or the 80s or even the mid-50s. The fact that you have gangs threatening cops by saying that they will turn Japan ‘into Mexico’ as far as violence goes should tell you everything to need to know about what the stakes are right now. Throw in the fact that younger yakuza recruits are more willing to pick a fight for the sake of violence and you have a terribly combustible mix of cash, drugs, guns, money, and weak mealy-mouthed social leaders who have been mentally & physically coerced into submission but are now trying to fight back.
As one Japanese writer recently stated to me, this could easily be a lost decade if not more to come for the national fight scene in Japan. For certain, there will be yakuza stooges who come in to run a few shows to launder cash and throw themselves a party. However, the police are adamantly telling TV networks to no longer do business with companies connected to the yakuza. With more and more police officers being hired by the networks as lead security investigators, the squeeze is coming.
Nobody knows what is going to happen in Japan, which is why there is such abject panic & nobody with a real plan of attack five years later after the death of PRIDE.
Topics: Japan, Media, MMA, PRIDE, UFC, Zach Arnold | 27 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Todd “TRT” Duffee?
Can’t even resist your little digs about TRT in an article about Japan?
Keep it classy gun smoke!
From a fighters perspective…. There are 26 fighters left under the Zuffa Banner who have competed in Pride. Of those 26… 9 of them had only 1 Pride fight….
Alistair Overeem
Fabricio Werdum
Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira
Josh Barnett
Mark Hunt
Gegard Mousasi
Dan Henderson
Mauricio Rua
Quinton Jackson
Vitor Belfort
Antonio Rogerio Nogueira
Anderson Silva
Wanderlei Silva
Kazuo Misaki
Yves Edwards
Takanori Gomi
Gilbert Melendez
Mike Russow – 1 Fight
Robbie Lawler – 1 Fight
Yushin Okami – 1 Fight
Nick Diaz – 1 Fight
Sean Sherk – 1 Fight
Mac Danzig – 1 Fight
Aaron Riley – 1 Fight
Josh Thomson – 1 Fight
Hatsu Hioki – 1 Fight
Zuffa has over 350 fighters under contract, so 5 years later, the Pride veterans make up a very small percentage of the top talent in the sport today. If you discount the 1 and done Pride fighters, you are left with 17 Zuffa fighters who have had multiple Pride fights. That’s less then 5% of their entire roster.
Crazy how much the sport has changed.
When I think about this the reality sets in the PRIDE was a while ago. It’s been what, 6-7 years? That’s a long time for fighters.
Nick Diaz is a pride guy?
I wouldn’t call him a “PRIDE Guy”, but he did fight Takanori Gomi in PRIDE.
The list just shows how few of any of the guys who competed in PRIDE before are still left in the UFC. Within 2 years that list will be under 20. By the 10th anniversary it will be under 10 fighters.
PRIDE FC is quickly becoming an after thought in today’s MMA world.
I sort of thought it already was?
Zach is only writing about it because JMMA is something that he loves and understands more then anyone else.
I would say that it is very little, if anything, to do with modern-day (2012) MMA.
That being said, I still *heart* Sakikabara and Pride Never Die!
What’s also really interesting is the star power the Pride guys have. 9 of last years 16 ppvs were headlined by the former Pride fighters on your list.
the only other nickname he deserves is ‘choker’, so bringing up TRT is actually kinda nice
“It was a pathetic, but fitting spectacle…”
Lol.
😉
“…they did ‘due diligence’ after the transaction instead of before it. I wonder why.”
Because they deemed it worth the price one way or the other to get pride out of the way.
Maybe they could make something out of it, maybe not.
But pride still had a modicum of respect in the mma space, deserved or not, and the name brand would have continued to be a thorn in the side even under nitwits and scumbags of the gary shaw/m1 level of things.
“They won the battle but the media continues the image war against them by selectively not covering UFC despite the Japanese fight fans being desperate for some sort of product to support.”
That might seem weird and unfair to murikans (even though we do the same thing), but there is no murikan race or people to defend and honor like in Japan.
murika is a business and industry.
murika for “murikans” is not the same as Japan for Japanese people.
Ed. — I’m giving you a warning here on using the slang ‘murika.’ I don’t allow people going around to use the term ‘Jap’ to describe the Japanese, so show the same courtesy when talking about Americans. OK?
Is “murika” a racially insensitive term used in Japan to describe Americans?
Didn’t Ed Fishman claim to have made or planned to make a $20 mil bid for Pride but Zuffa was willing to overpay so much he didn’t bother? Or maybe I’m misremembering. I believe he mentioned it to you in an interview back around the time of this sale.
Ed. — Ed was approached by “nobu” for a big loan and Ed said, well, if I’m going to pay out that much, I may as well buy it. He was going to buy the assets and run Vegas, AC, Asia, and casino spots with Harrah’s connections because they saw it as a hot property to attract whales. So, when he made this pitch to “Nobu,’ he balked and ended up cutting a deal with UFC behind Ed’s back.
I think the main thing with Fishman is that he wanted to do his due diligence with PRIDE’s assets and whatnot BEFORE buying the company. Obviously, DSE gave him
shitfor that, so he pulled out.Zach, it always seemed implied by Fishman and others that Nobuyuki Sakakibara used Fishman’s “offer” to go to Zuffa and get a much bigger offer from them to keep it out of Ed’s hands, very similar to what happened with Strikeforce. Do you see any truth in that?
Ed. — Perhaps, but I think he got scared off once Ed said, hey, I’ll pay — but let me do due diligence. Ed was going to pay a lot more than what PRIDE ended up getting sold for.
If they got it for $10-13 mil than they got the steal of a lifetime although the released Zuffa finance info make me think it was more. The 2007 S&P statement reported they took out a $250 mil loan for past debt & a large dividend payment which they upped to $300 mil when they purchased Pride. The supposed memo to Deutsche Bank indicated that the dividend was $199 mil so with $40 mil in debt or so according to Zuffa that means they spent around the rumored $65 mil on Pride.
The purchase was not worth it in terms of video library and talent.
It was 100% worth it in shoring up a lot of the talent from going to other organizations.
If they didn’t pay then, they would have paid later by buying up other companies.
Man, the Hammer looks bad. He looks like Robert De Niro in Frankenstein.
You can say that again spacedog!
Damn, was it REALLY just two – three years ago that this guy was active in the UFC?!!
He looks 60 for Pete’s sake. A much weathered, worn out 60 at that. Poor guy.
No disrespect meant either. I’m just shocked.
And by listening to him speak, it’s obvious that the accumulation of head trauma that he’s taken throughout his career is now taking it’s toll.
Also, though I hate to point fingers, I’m certain that a lot of the ill effects that we’re seeing in him now are the result of certain chemicals that he may have ingested during his run as a monster heavyweight back in the day. I mean, honestly, how else did he go from a massive physical specimen in the early UFCs & PRIDE to a worn out looking 205 pounder?
Coleman was 240-245 in the early UFCs and PRIDE, not really a “massive physical specimen”. And most of the ill effects we’re seeing in him now, sad to say, are because he was and is a heavy drinker.
Can you cite anything to back this up, or are you just throwing this out there?
Which, the weight or the drinking? For the weight you can check the tale of the tape for any of the early UFCs; he was 245 against Mo Smith just off the top of my head. As for the drinking, obviously nobody knows for sure exactly how much anybody imbibes in their private life, but Coleman’s well known to be deep in his cups at any afterparty, Randleman and Brandon Lee Hinkle have both mentioned in interviews that much of Coleman’s preparation for fights in the early days consisted of “stopping drinking a week or so ahead of time”, and he’s been publically intoxicated at a number of mma events, most recently (to my knowledge, anyway) at the DFL event in Atlantic City main evented by Tara Larosa.
I’m not calling Coleman an alcoholic, nor am I trying to slander the guy. I’m personally a fan, and he certainly seems to be doing a fine job of raising his daughters so I doubt he’s dependent to the point that it’s seriously disrupting his life. But a guy in his late 40’s who’s been drinking for a long time is obviously going to show some of the effects of it physically, especially when it’s concurrent with putting his body through the rigors of weight cutting and high level combat sports.
Zuffa released King Mo. Just goes to show you that if you mouth off in public, make sure you have the name value. This happens in all sports and walks of life.
Also, 6 fighters were drug tested after the UFC 146 press conference by the NSAC.
Call me a conspiracy theorist…. But something tells me Zuffa wants to make sure Overeem won’t piss hot BEFORE he has the potential to win the belt.
I think it has more to do with a) the NAC announced they’d be doing more random testing B) Overeem is obligated to give 2 random tests since the last fiasco. With everyone in town it was a convenient time.
Dick move by Dana again. Nothing new.
According to FrontRowBrian he wasn’t even man enough to make the call himself and let Mo try to explain himself.
Made Sean Shelby call him instead.
Well, that would make sense…. Shelby is the SF matchmaker….
Chris Benoit was most likely a case of brain damage from CTE, not “roid rage”.
[…] it turned out, this grandest of spectacles was to mark the beginning of the end for Pride owner Nobuyuki Sakakibara. Envious eyes were looking on from the other side of the Pacific and just a few short months later […]
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